During spikes like this one, when gas could skyrocket to $5 a gallon, the proverbial green turns to chartreuse, green with a sickly yellowish tinge.

You may have heard Norby on the radio touting a stellar solar company.

In a recent blog post, the county planning commissioner and downtown Encinitas go-to guy blasts gasbag Michael Reagan for a partisan attack on electric vehicles.

“We find it liberating,” Norby tells Reagan, “that we don’t visit gas stations and no longer need to worry about the volatile price spikes of gasoline that so damage the incomes of our families and our nation’s economic health.”

While Norby embraces the future with liberated optimism, I find myself in times of petrol panic thinking about the fearless practicality of the past.

My grandmother, born in Julian and raised in the Imperial Valley, had this simple rule about hitchhikers: Pick them up. Somebody needs a ride? Stop.

The word “hitchhiking” first appeared in the Sept. 19, 1923, edition of The Nation.

An anonymous columnist called the Drifter (he reminds me of E.B. White) compares his New England tour in “Susie,” a Ford sedan, to journeys of old:

“If there are neither pilgrims nor wandering minstrels, there are ‘hitchhikers.’ Suddenly, some hundreds of feet in front of Susie, who was northward bound, appeared three figures who were at once lithe and stalwart. The Drifter stopped and beheld three young women. ... They wanted a lift. They were New York girls on a vacation determined to beg lifts to Montreal. One of them was communicative. “We’ve had good luck. ... There are thousands of us, of course. Hitchhiking is always done by twos and threes. We know girls who hitched to California.”

Hitchhiking was embossed in the American grain through the Depression, the World War II years, the ’50s, reaching its zenith in the ’60s and ’70s when hitchhikers seemed everywhere.

At UC Davis, the trip to San Francisco was simple: Walk to I-80, stick out a thumb and flag a ride in minutes. (The company was uneven but the price was always right.)

At San Diego State, dozens of hitchhikers with signs for OB, PB or MB used to line up at Montezuma Road in the afternoon.

The sun has set on those freeloaders, green before it was cool to save energy.